The following is adapted from an article originally published on March 24, 2014, is a chapter of the book, A History of Violence, published by Verso Books.
The coyote returned much sooner than expected. Normally, he’d be gone more than twenty days, but this time he came back only five or six days after having crossed Mexico’s southern border. That’s why Fernando, the coyote’s driver in El Salvador, was surprised to receive his boss’s call. It was August 2010 when the coyote asked his driver to pick him up at the Salvadoran border town of San Cristóbal. He was alone, without his six migrants. The coyote—so Fernando later explained to investigators—was nervous, refusing to explain what had happened and offering nothing but excuses: “A dog bit me.” A few days after, Fernando would know for a fact that no dog had bitten the coyote. It had been a far bigger beast.
***
On Wednesday, August 25, 2010, Salvadoran newspapers blared the headline: “Seventy-two Bodies Found at Tamaulipas Ranch.” In the early morning of August 23, a disoriented eighteen-year-old Ecuadoran with a bullet wound through his neck stumbled up to a marine checkpoint in Northern Mexico. He said that he had survived a massacre perpetrated by Northern Mexico’s crime lords, Los Zetas. The marines traveled to a cluster of towns called San Fernando and from there they journeyed to a village called La Joya. In the middle of nowhere, on a narrow dirt road, they were met by a storm of bullets. Three gunmen and one marine died in the crossfire. The surviving hit man fled. The marines trekked on to a warehouse where they saw a snake of bodies coiled against a cement wall, bunched on top of each other, swollen, deformed, tied up. Massacred.
Thanks to the testimony of the surviving Ecuadorian, a boy named Luis Freddy Lala Pomadilla, every Salvadoran news- paper picked up the story of the massacred migrants. Little by little, day by day, the facts were confirmed: Fifty-eight men and fourteen women, migrants from Central America, Ecuador, Brazil and India, all on their way to the United States, were massacred by Los Zetas.
***
Fernando, the driver, tells me that on the day the headline was printed around the world, he got a call from the coyote. “I’m out of here,” the coyote said. “If the police come, tell them you don’t know me.”
“But why?”
“Remember: You don’t know nothing about me!”
***
Fernando is the name given to the coyote’s driver as a key witness in the trial against six Salvadorans accused of human smuggling. Fernando and the coyote had known each other since they were kids. They were neighbors when Fernando lost his job and accepted the coyote’s offer to work as his driver. Fernando told the judge, prosecutors of the anti-trafficking unit and various agents of the Elite Division Against Organized Crime (DECO), that his job usually entailed picking the coyote up, driving him to meetings with potential clients, driving him to meetings with other members of their organization and driving him to the Guatemalan border. Until August 2010, his job did not entail keeping his mouth shut in front of the police.
In December 2010, the police showed up. They arrested Fernando as well as a 33-year-old man named Érick Francisco Escobar. According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office (PPO), the police, Fernando, and other witnesses, Érick is the coyote in question.
Police investigators had located the victims’ families and obtained seven corroborating testimonies. One of the wit- nesses, a man whose son was shot to death by Los Zetas in Tamaulipas, was the only witness who said he was able to recognize Érick. And he did. He pointed out the coyote who had guided his son to his death.
Fernando was also accused of belonging to the human- smuggling ring, but after a few weeks in the San Vicente penitentiary—where he was forced to sleep sitting upright next to a toilet—he decided to tell investigators what he knew.
Three months after the first round of arrests, the police detained a man who had managed to stay under the radar. Carlos Ernesto Teos Parada is a large man from the town of Tecapán, leader of the first division soccer team Atlético Marte and owner of several city buses. According to investigations as well as Fernando’s declaration, he was the leader of the pack of coyotes of which Érick was a member.
Sabas López Sánchez, a twenty-year-old kid, and Karen Escobar Luna, twenty-eight years old, were also from Tecapán. They both ended up in the snake of corpses found in the abandoned warehouse in Tamaulipas.
***
Fernando’s declaration allows us to imagine that the migrants, at least the six traveling with Érick, spent their last days hanging from the back of a train.
Fernando painted a picture of two migrant routes through Mexico. One of them starts in Chiapas, where hundreds of thousands of migrants pour into Mexico every year after dipping their toes in the Suchiate River that divides Guatemala and Mexico. Through a stretch of 175 miles where the train doesn’t run, migrants will walk through shrubland and then take chiapaneco buses or shared taxis until they get to the city of Arriaga, where they’ll crawl onto the back of the steel beast for an eleven-hour ride under the unforgiving August sun to the city of Ixtepec, Oaxaca, where they’ll switch trains, catching one that runs much faster, forty-five miles an hour for six to eight hours, to the city of Medias Aguas, Veracruz, where the trains coming from Oaxaca and Tabasco meet and continue north on the same track to Mexico City. From there, the migrants go on to the cities of Ciudad Victoria, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, where they cross the Rio Grande, outsmart the US Border Patrol and finally, with tremendous luck, reach the vast state of Texas.
Fernando knew Érick to be a man of vices. A drinker and coke user. He liked, as the witness put it, “to fly.”
In the world of coyotes, snorting coke is as drinking whiskey is to the world of gamblers. Nothing special. And it wouldn’t be an identifying trait, we wouldn’t have even noticed, if what happened hadn’t happened.
Fernando told prosecutors how one day Carlos Teos and Érick got together in the town of Usulután with some other members of their coyote group. This was about a month before the massacre. Teos doled out instructions. He spoke of the migrant route, of making new contacts, and ordered some of the members to pay their dues. Fernando noticed the dull glint of a firearm and followed all orders. Teos came back with a wad of bills and gave Érick $3,000, enough money to cover several trips north.
The families of the six massacred Salvadorans say they had arranged to pay Érick between $5,700 and $7,500. They paid half up front and were to pay the other half once they reached the other side, the United States, soil they never set foot on.
After the meeting, Fernando drove Érick to Constitution Boulevard in San Salvador, to a neighborhood called La Granjita (the Little Ranch), run by an old Salvadoran gang by the name of Mao Mao. The barrio is often referred to as La Pradera (the Prairie) because of an eponymous motel in the area. Érick was looking to buy some coke and “run some lines” in the car.
The lines of coke would be a typical part of the story for any coyote, a simple curiosity, had Fernando’s story not ended as it ended.
***
On the road, one of the women traveling north with the coyote called a family member, who later testified against the coyote. The prosecutor’s report paints the woman as having sounded upbeat:
“I’m in Mexico and I’m with the guy who’s going to take me. I’m fine. Tell everyone I say hi. I’ll let you know when I’m in the United States.”
Another migrant called his father from the road.
“Who are you going with?” his dad had asked. “Are you with Érick?”
“Yep, he’s still with us. He’s waiting for us.”
What happened hadn’t yet happened. These small events hadn’t yet resulted in the coiled snake of bodies.
***
On August 11, according to various reports, six migrants left El Salvador and were massacred thirteen days later on an abandoned ranch in Tamaulipas.
Fernando says the group stayed in two hotels a few blocks away from San Salvador’s international bus station. Some of the migrants stayed at Hotel Ipanema, others in Hotel Pasadena. Both are short-stay hotels that charge $17 for a double bed. They’re used by truckers, migrants and coyotes.
The investigators were able to get a search warrant for Hotel Pasadena. Among the guests were a ten-year-old and an eighteen-year-old about to start their journey north with two coyotes: a recent deportee from the United States and a cop. The investigators detained both coyotes. They also found a Guatemalan man by the name of José María Negrero Sermeño. The investigators radioed the man’s records to be checked, and they soon found that he had an arrest warrant (issued by a Salvadoran judge) for human smuggling. When they seized his multiple phones, they found the numbers of police officers, migration officials, Central American border guards and various governmental officials. When they reviewed the man’s previous calls, they found that he’d been in communication with Érick and Carlos Teos.
The ill-fated migrants got onto an international bus trave- ling toward the capital of Guatemala. Érick gave the bus driver $120. According to Fernando, that was $20 per migrant to be used by the bus driver as collateral in case any police officer noticed that the migrants had a guide out there somewhere. Érick, Fernando and another man—Carlos Arnoldo Ventura, who would later be sentenced to four years in prison for smuggling—drove to the border. Fernando remembers Érick calling Carlos Teos. The two men chatted about possible routes and dates.
Case files state that Carlos Teos—who had a US tourist visa—left El Salvador almost a week after the migrants. Fernando says Teos’s job was to welcome the migrants in the United States, guide them to their families and charge for the second half of the trip. Teos would sometimes exit El Salvador through a checkpoint and sometimes not, though he would never enter through a checkpoint. Teos’s bank records show that he’s the kind of man who goes from having no cash to close to $10,000 in less than a month; the kind of man who goes from having $85,000 one day to $94,000 three days later.
The last thing Fernando knew of Érick is that he crossed the border without passing through a checkpoint and boarded a bus with his migrants in Guatemala.
***
And then Fernando received Érick’s call. A call that came much too soon.
“I’m out of here,” the coyote said. “If the police come, tell them you don’t know me.”
For a few weeks the coyote disappeared. When he resurfaced, as Fernando claimed in his declaration, Érick shared with him a small detail that would completely change his story.
Érick told Fernando that he had spent money that is sacred for a successful trip. To pay for his vices, Érick blew the money he had set aside to pay off Los Zetas. Érick—so Fernando said—knew the seriousness of his actions, he knew he had spent money he needed to have, money that was not negotiable, and that’s why he abandoned his six Salvadorans.
***
When the investigator tells me that Carlos Teos and Érick were acquitted by a deputy judge of the Specialized Sentencing Court of San Salvador, his voice breaks. I could almost hear a sob in the back of his throat.
Despite Fernando’s testimony, the call records, the eyewitness account of the father of one of the massacred boys, despite the fact that the same evidence and the same testimony prompted another judge to convict two other members of the group, the deputy judge in this case acquitted Érick and Carlos Teos.
“It was a total surprise, we’d already been celebrating ... It’s so sad. We all looked at each other in disbelief.”
The Public Prosecutor’s Office has appealed and is awaiting the criminal court’s decision whether or not to reopen the case and assign another judge.
Meanwhile, the only thing left of the victims’ families was the testimony they themselves gave. Every one of the family members who spoke in court received a death threat. Someone called each of them and told them that they would be disappeared, murdered. They related the threats to the prosecutors and then fled for their lives.
***
Thanks to an Ecuadorian child, much of the world learned what happened on that abandoned Tamaulipas ranch.
On September 14, 2010, eighteen-year-old Luis Freddy Lala Pomadilla of Riobamba, Ecuador, spoke via video-call with a prosecutor from Mexico City. Pomadilla is one of two survivors, though the boy stresses that there may be another survivor who he saw escape the ranch one night, albeit followed by a thunderclap of gunfire.
The Mexican prosecutor was more interested in getting names and aliases out of Pomadilla. He asked for El Coyote, El Degollado (the Beheaded), Chabelo, El Kilo, Cabezón (Big Head) and El Gruñon (the Grouch), a known member of the Guatemalan special-op military unit with historical ties to Los Zetas, the Kaibiles. He also asked for the names and aliases of five more Salvadorans. He asked if any of these men were known to be Zetas. Pomadilla said they’d all kept their distance; he could barely remember El Kilo—Martín Omar Estrada, later captured and condemned as ruler of a Zetas zone of operation in San Fernando. Pomadilla—just like the six Salvadorans, he was abandoned by his coyote— remembers that it was some eight Zetas, all armed, driving a white double-cabin pickup and a four-wheel-drive Trooper, who stopped the three buses full of undocumented migrants approaching the US border. He remembers that he was taken to San Fernando and ordered to sit against a cement wall. He remembers that one of the Zetas asked if any of the men and women in the group wanted to be a Zeta. He remembers that only one migrant kid raised his hand and said yes. “But they killed him all the same.” They killed him and seventy-one more. Pomadilla, who had been taken for dead, remembers gunfire ringing for three solid minutes. The cacophony came from a single gun. Seventy-two migrants had been shot dead.
Los Zetas are, as a military colonel once described them to me, a gang of cavemen. The colonel was charged with over- seeing a state of emergency in northern Guatemala in 2011. As the colonel put it, the Zetas shoot first, then torture, then murder, and then, if anybody is still alive, they ask their victims to please follow orders.
The cavemen in them, however, don’t overshadow the mobsters in them. One interest is present in absolutely every operation this gang has masterminded since I’ve been following them since 2008: profit. Why would they kidnap seventy-two migrants, take them to a forgotten, rural ranch and massacre them? What could they have gained?
The main theory of the Mexican authorities is that Los Zetas killed the migrants because they’d refused to join them. One of the women, guided by Érick and murdered at the ranch by Los Zetas, was merely eighteen years old and from the Salvadoran state of Libertad. Does that fit the profile of somebody usually recruited by Los Zetas?
The story of the six Salvadoran migrants who were murdered, who paid with their lives the small infraction committed by their coyote, speaks to another strain of logic. Those who don’t pay can’t cross. Migrating through Mexico has a cost, and those costs are set and collected by Los Zetas.
The coyotes and migrants who want to avoid paying their taxes will have to confront the cavemen. What message could be more powerful than seventy-two corpses coiled against a cement wall?
Perhaps Los Zetas hoped to send their message to coyotes and migrants in one blast. But in order to be sure, in order to understand just how the mafia was able to change the coyote rule book, we have to sit down with one of those stealthy guides.
There are few better places to find a good coyote than the Salvadoran state of Chalatenango.
***
There are six empty pint glasses and a plate of appetizers that the cheese-and-cigarette trafficker is picking and poking at. We’re seated in the restaurant of a small hotel on the outskirts of the capital of Chalatenango, which is really just a small town with a bank and a smattering of fast-food restaurants. The cheese trafficker, whom I met thanks to an intermediary, says this restaurant and hotel are owned by a famous coyote from Chalatenango. The coyote looks nervous as he approaches our table, though you can tell he’s interested in who I am and what I’m doing at his restaurant. The cheese trafficker, thinking better of introducing us, falls silent.
The round-bellied trafficker seated beside me buys cheese for pennies in Nicaragua and brings back hundreds of pounds of it hidden behind false doors in cargo trucks. He also coordinates truckloads of Chinese and Russian cigarettes packaged in mislabeled containers headed to Ocotepeque, Honduras. Once the trucks cross the border, they take the labels off and sell the cigarettes at half the price of other brands. In many stores in Chalatenango you’ll be more likely to find Modern than Marlboro.
As the trafficker’s plan has backfired, and for some strange reason he seems intent on helping me in my search for a coyote, he slaps off his hat, takes a deep breath, narrows his eyes, and says: “You can turn over a stone here and find a coyote. The problem is that the young ones, the new ones, are more skittish, and they don’t like talking to journalists. This guy might blow us off, but why don’t we try with someone higher up? I’m grateful to him because he’s the one that showed me the ropes of cheese trafficking. He’s the coyote who teaches every- one else how to work. He’s the first coyote of Chalatenango.”
It’s Friday, and the cheese trafficker says to give him the weekend to talk to this lord of coyotes.
***
The lord of coyotes is big and tough as nails. He amicably welcomes us into his home in Chalatenango, sending for tilapia, rice, tortillas and beer.
The cheese trafficker has succeeded in convincing his boss that in exchange for his stories and explanations, in exchange for his testimony, I’ll keep his identity secret. The coyote trusts me. And that’s why, on this October evening of 2013, the conversation moves along without hesitation.
The coyote is sixty years old. He got into the business of taking people to the United States in 1979. In his first attempt to cross into the United States, he paid 600 colones—which at the time was about US$240—to a Guatemalan coyote. The trip ended with him being locked up in Tijuana. While serving time in various detention centers he got to know another Guatemalan coyote. This other lord of coyotes, who was a twenty-something-year-old kid at the time, offered to find him new clients in El Salvador. In those days, so the coyote remembers, his job was not demonized. Coyotes weren’t detained simply for being coyotes, and they certainly weren’t put on trial, as happened to Érick, in the Specialized Court for Organized Crime. This coyote felt so comfortable with what he was doing that in order to promote his business he opened an office in the central Salvadoran city of Cuscatancingo and published ads in the classifieds section of various newspapers announcing: “Safe trips to the United States,” along with a business telephone number. A few months later, when he had already learned from the Guatemalan everything he needed to learn, the coyote branched off and started his own business. People would call his office and ask how long they’d have to walk. The coyote would explain that they would travel through Mexico by bus, and that they’d cross the border through Mexicali, San Luis Río Colorado or Algodones, and that they wouldn’t walk more than an hour. And that’s how it was. When the coyote had about fifteen to twenty people, he’d start the journey north. The largest group he crossed was thirty-five people. Crossing Mexico, the coyote remembers, could be a pleasant trip. “People only had to get off the bus to take a piss,” he remembers. Everything would already be taken care of at the migration checkpoints, and they’d only have to pay a few dollars at each checkpoint.
In the mid-’80s, after the National Guard searched his office, mistaking his business for a guerrilla unit, the coyote decided to take a few years off, alternating long stays in the United States with sporadic jobs crossing small groups of migrants.
Then in 2004 the coyote started working again. Business, however, had gotten more difficult, and it was about to get worse.
“Everything was changing. There was more security in Mexico, and suddenly it was a crime to be a coyote in Guatemala. So the price for a coyote went up to $6,000 per person. Few things were the same.”
Traveling coyotes, those who guided their migrants throughout all of Mexico, had become nearly obsolete.
“By this point the job had more to do with coordination, and that’s how it still is. A coyote in Guatemala is in charge of organizing a group of people on the southern border of Mexico, then there’s the guy who takes them to Mexico City. He’s usually a Mexican. He’s paid anywhere from $1,200 to $1,300 per person. In Mexico City, another guy takes them to the US border. That guy charges $800, and you have to pay him another $100 for securing the housing and food for the little chickens. So to get from here to the US border, a migrant needs to put in some $2,500. Then, to get into the United States, to go to Houston, for example, coyotes charge $2,000. Some ask $2,500 just to get across the border. Then they keep them there, detained, in safe houses. I wire them money from here, and they start letting people out of the safe house one by one. They’d charge $500 just for the vans that drive people to the safe houses. Now they charge $700. So for each person, the coyote in Guatemala is making $1,000 to $1,500 in profit.”
One can cut expenses in Mexico, but that requires methods that, for this coyote, are “inhumane.” For example, squeezing 120 migrants in a cargo truck routed to the US border without stops. If you have the right contacts at the Mexican customs office, they can flag the truck as being full of fruit when in reality the truck is full of dozens of people suffocating from heat and lack of oxygen, without deodorant or perfume, without watches or cell phones, without anything that could beep and give them away. There are coyotes who can save a few hundred dollars by stuffing people under the false bottom of a banana truck and making their migrants ride lying down for more than twenty hours until they reach Mexico City. But this coyote considers these methods inhumane.
The coyote says the price of guided migration has gone up in the past five years, and that no one priding himself in being a good coyote should take a migrant to the United States for less than $7,000 dollars.
“There are more risks now,” the coyote says, and with a finger in the air he traces the letter Z.
“When did you start to pay off Los Zetas?” I ask.
“We started working with them in 2005, but it wasn’t mandatory yet. Having a contact with Los Zetas was like a guarantee for safety, so we’d seek them out. The Mexican coyote would organize all that and make contacts with the police. Later, around 2007, Los Zetas started to squeeze the undocumented migrant directly. They didn’t care whose migrants they were. They started charging $100 per person. It’s only gotten worse.”
Los Zetas, who were initially the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel, branched off around 2007. Maybe the migrant tax was initially like a bonus to their salaries, but it later became guaranteed income, their low-hanging fruit.
“A hundred a head, that’s what Los Zetas charge to let you cross Mexico?” I ask.
“Now it’s $200. A coyote should include that sum in the initial quote they give to migrants. The risk is higher, that’s why the price has gone up, the coyote doesn’t want to risk his life for $1,000 in profits.”
“Do you have an understanding with Los Zetas?”
“We give the money to the Mexicans, it’s the Mexican coyotes who take care of these things. I don’t know any Zetas. If someone here says he knows one of them, he’s a liar. That Mexican contact might be paying $100 and charging me $200. That might be going on. But we have to pay up.”
“Or?”
“Well, look what happened with the massacre in Tamaulipas, they owed them, and these guys didn’t give a damn whose migrants they were. To them it was just a message: Someone forgot to pay, so this is what has to happen. And now that coyote has to pay the consequences. No one rounds a group of people up just to send them to their deaths, a coyote just wants to make money and gain credibility.”
“But there are coyotes who still travel through Mexico with their migrants?”
“A good coyote won’t travel with his migrants. That doesn’t exist anymore. No one will put himself through that risk. Maybe they’ll leave them in Ciudad Hidalgo [on the southern border of Mexico]. Everything is done piece by piece; one has to coordinate. OK, there are the madmen on the train. The train guys charge some $4,000 to $5,000. But those are the polleritos [a chicken man, referring to a guide leading and traveling with pollos, or migrants, as opposed to a coyote] who take two, three people. Some of them actually want to go north themselves, and they’ve already made the trip before, they know a little about what it’s like to ride the train, so they pick up a couple more people and they all go together. But that’s how people get kidnapped. If you always pay $200 per person, they won’t bother you, but if you go all by yourself ... well ... then. That’s when the Zetas get angry: ‘This guy is going to cross and not pay anything,’ and then they double down and charge up to $5,000 a head. If you work with those Mexican contacts who know the Zetas, then you’re guaranteed that your migrants will cross Mexico, no problem. I mean, this group is in with the military and police. An officer will even detain you, check to see if you’ve already paid Los Zetas, and if you’ve paid, they’ll let you go right away. If they realize you haven’t had contact with Los Zetas, then they’ll squeeze you, and you’re not going to go to jail, they’ll take you straight to them, to Los Zetas. That’s why people disappear. Mexico isn’t a problem if you’ve dealt with Los Zetas. But if not ...”
By nightfall, I say good-bye to the coyote, leaving that “if not” hanging over our heads. For the six migrants who left with Érick, that “if not” led to a storm of bullets in an abandoned warehouse. For others, the “if not” can lead to worse. If you’ve paid your due to Los Zetas, you’re fine. But if not …
***
Sometimes Bertila forgets what she’s saying. She also eats very little. Over sixty years old, Bertila weighs less than 100 pounds. On March 27, 2011, her son Charli disappeared as he was traveling from San Luis Potosí, Mexico, to the northern border city of Reynosa. Since then, Bertila eats hardly anything and sleeps poorly. She dreams, though. She dreams that Charli is not dead, that he’s come back home, and she says to him in her dream, “I thought something bad had happened to you.” And he responds: “To me? Nothing’s happened to me.”
Sick of earning $4 a day in his maquiladora job, motivated by the impending birth of his first daughter and persuaded by an offer of a loan from a coyote—which he planned to pay off after a few months of working in the United States—Charli decided to leave behind his house in Izalco (in western El Salvador) and migrate north. He left with a coyote and four other migrants.
I’m seated in a patio in the village of Izalco with Bertila, Charli’s mother, and this is what, from under the weight of her pain, she tells me.
Charli, his coyote and the other migrants left on a Monday ready to ride a combination of buses and trains to the US border. By that same Friday, however, the coyote was back in Izalco with all his migrants, except for Charli. In Oaxaca state, migration officials had detained the entire group, except for Charli, and deported them. Charli continued north by himself.
He reached the northern Mexican state of San Luis Potosí and stayed four days at the house of some distant relatives who had settled there years previously. That was where he contacted his family for the last time, speaking not with Bertila, but with Jorge, his brother, who worked as a day laborer in Oklahoma. Jorge told me over the phone that Charli had had his doubts. By this point the coyote from his village had set off again from El Salvador with his four migrants. This would be their second attempt. Charli, so Jorge remembers, told the coyote that he was thinking of going north to Reynosa on his own where he could look for another coyote to help him cross the border. Jorge tried to find the female coyote who had guided him a few years back. She worked by using other people’s documents and crossing people through border checkpoints, or by leading her clients straight across the Rio Grande. The difference between the two options was half a grand. She charged $2,500 for false documents and $2,000 for the trip across the river. But Jorge couldn’t find her, and Charli was getting impatient. Even so, he told his brother, the coyote from their village had warned him: He’d told him not to move, to wait for him. He told him that the road north was full of Zetas, that they’d sniff him out. They were on the hunt for migrants who walked alone.
Jorge had some idea of the dangers ahead. Just a few months before, a cousin of his had gone to the United States and told him he’d miraculously made it alive: “He told me Los Zetas would kidnap a coyote’s migrants if he didn’t come to them first, that they were always looking for any coyote who refused to pay. My cousin had to travel with one of those coyotes, and when he realized Los Zetas were looking for him, he had no choice but to run from his group. Luckily, he was able to hide.”
And yet, to wait in Mexico as a migrant is to wait in limbo ... in an interminable hell.
Charli decided to catch a bus headed to Reynosa.
***
On April 6, 2011, the authorities of Tamaulipas state announced that they’d found eight mass graves in a village called La Joya, outside of San Fernando, the same town in which, just the year before, Los Zetas had massacred seventy- two migrants in an abandoned warehouse. The graves were full of fifty-nine rotting bodies. Some of their skulls had been bashed in.
At first, the state authorities tried to minimize the situation, labeling the dead as “members of transnational criminal organizations, kidnappers and victims of highway violence.”
But the bodies wouldn’t stop sprouting from the ground.
By April 8, eight bodies were reported to have been found; by April 15, the toll was 145 bodies in thirty-six separate graves; by April 29, the governor of Tamaulipas announced that 196 people had been found murdered.
We realized only too late that we could have done something to stop the carnage, that the least we could’ve done was take preventative measures after finding the seventy-two bodies in 2010. The US National Security Archive declassified a series of cables sent from various American officials working throughout Mexico to Washington, DC. The communiqués, primarily sent from Matamoros, a border town close to San Fernando, stated that between March 19 and March 24 of that year, almost a month before any of the mass graves had been found, droves of hit men were pulling over buses en route to Reynosa and kidnapping their passengers. The state knew about it.
This same route, despite his coyote’s warnings, is how Charli traveled. It’s the route that thousands of migrants from all over the world take to arrive at the last stage of their journey: the US border. Those kidnappings were not random or isolated; they had become the norm.
Though an interdisciplinary commission was charged with identifying the discovered bodies, many of the bodies were actually identified thanks to mothers of the disappeared. They traveled all the way from Central America to offer blood samples for the DNA tests.
One of those mothers was Bertila. One of the bodies identified was Charli.
Bertila, now seated at a pupusería table on the patio of her house in the village of Izalco, has one foot in this reality and another deep in the sea of her thoughts. Her gaze seems to lose itself inward, and she often forgets what we’re talking about. It’s as though a movie were continuously playing in her mind’s eye. Invariably, that movie is a tragedy. She dreams of police officers handing her a box or a coffin, or whatever it may be— the packaging changes—with Charli’s bones inside.
In December 2012, almost two years after her son was kidnapped and murdered by Los Zetas, Bertila received notice from Mexico’s attorney general that the body in row 11, lot 314, section 16 of the Municipal Cemetery of the Cross in Ciudad Victoria, belonged to her son Charli.
To describe the suffering of a mother whose son has been murdered and disappeared, whose bones she’ll never be able to bury—almost three years after that barbaric tragedy, Bertila still hasn’t received Charli’s remains—is a dangerous challenge. What adjective could describe Bertila’s feelings? What adjective could approximate her pain? The only thing I can think to write is that Bertila doesn’t wholly live in this world, that in her mind a terrifying dream plays and replays, disconnecting her from this world.
All I can write are her own words:
“Sometimes I forget that I’m talking ... sometimes, when they would ask me if I knew something about Charli, I felt that I was being punched ... from the inside ... I was falling, for a long time I was falling ... I threw myself on his bed and I stayed there. Two years, seven months and ten days have passed. The bones ... well, I’d find a little peace with them. Though maybe I’ll never find complete peace. But that would fill my life a bit, because sometimes this thought terrifies me ... Whenever it rains hard I imagine that the bones might wash away and I’ll never be able to find them. That has me ... every time I hear of a hurricane in Mexico, that there’s a storm, a tropical storm, I think about that. It’s a deep anxiety when I see that everyone is able to bring flowers to their dead or bring their loved ones over to meet them ... I can’t even receive mine ...”
Again, the question: Why kidnap Charli and others like him? Why waste the gas and the men, why risk getting caught to detain a bus of migrants? Why bother to take them to different towns outside of San Fernando? Why murder with such brutality? Most of the bodies have no bullet wounds. They died by brute force, with hard, sharp objects, with sticks and machetes. Why all the carnage?
Why did this happen to Charli? Why did this happen to the six migrants traveling with Érick? Why did this happen to seventy-two people in 2010? Why did this happen to 196 people in 2011?
The coyote of Chalatenango tries to answer these questions.
We agreed to meet a second time at his house in Chalatenango, but at the last minute, the coyote changes plans. He says he’s working on one of his ranches, that we should meet on the highway in front of the Fourth Infantry Brigade. He tells me to turn on my emergency lights, pull over to the side of the road and that when he passes me, he’ll honk his horn.
He arrives. One of his laborers is driving. The coyote is drunk.
In theory we’d go to one of his ranches, but I end up following him to his house. We sit down in the same spot as last time. It’s hard to get the conversation going because he wants to talk about other things. I concede. For a while we talk horses, whether the Appaloosa is better than the Morgan, whether the Spanish is better than the Peruvian.
One of his men brings out a tray of beer.
It’s been an hour and we still don’t talk of migrants. We’re in an alleyway with no exit. I ask questions and he answers with disconnected, rambling thoughts.
Finally, when I’ve understood that the conversation should end, that he’s tired, that his eyes are closing for want of sleep, I raise my voice and say:
“I don’t understand the massacres, the deaths, the craziness of Los Zetas.”
He finally seems like he’s about done talking and raises his voice to a pitch to answer my question.
“It’s obvious. They’ve made their threat clear to those who don’t want to pay. They [the massacres] are just messages. I recommend people study the situation before they go north. Is your coyote going to pay or not? If he’s not going to pay, may God be with you.”
*Translated by John Washington and Daniela Ugaz
This article also appeared in A History of Violence, published by Verso Books in 2017
